Intriguing premise and spooky setting don’t make up for lackluster storytelling.
A young doctor’s surgical residency at New York’s iconic Bellevue Hospital mires him in murder, mystery, and mayhem.
Cook, the acclaimed founder of the medical-thriller genre, begins this standalone novel with a horrifying scene, set in 1949, in which a Bellevue doctor performs a lobotomy on an 8-year-old girl who is being treated for behavioral issues. The scene and the setting should be the perfect start to what could be a cringe-inducing horror story, but a weak, cliche-riddled narrative drags the novel down. Michael “Mitt” Fuller, a descendant of the doctor who performed the girl’s lobotomy, is excited to follow in the professional footsteps of four generations of Fullers who practiced medicine at Bellevue, but on day one of his residency, strange things begin to happen. Lights flicker, horrible odors come and go, surgical tools seem to have a mind of their own, patients die. Soon, he also learns that his ancestors were on the wrong side of evolving medical standards, including the now rejected lobotomy procedure, the use of anesthesia, and surgical theater antiseptics. He also sees dead people. This should be a page turner, but stilted dialogue and one-dimensional characters who can’t stop using worn out expressions such as “Good Grief,” “My Gosh,” and “Whoa!” are way too distracting, as are the descriptions of medical equipment, procedures, and illnesses that require a textbook to understand. What is interesting is the history of the centuries-old Bellevue, its architecture, and its famous patients, including Sylvia Plath and Norman Mailer. The ending, which rolls out in another perfect setting—the basement of an abandoned building—is spot on, but getting to it means slogging through page after page of dull writing.
Intriguing premise and spooky setting don’t make up for lackluster storytelling.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780593718834
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone.
Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy’s National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican’s secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn’t supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn’t think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani’s enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter’s apartment, Richter swears that he’s being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who’s both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric’s forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770566
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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